Binny bewitched / Hilary McKay ; illustrated by Tony Ross.
"When Binny finds the money someone left behind at an ATM--and then loses it--she must play detective in this delightful romp from Hilary McKay. Binny Cornwallis is not a thief. Or is she? In one greedy moment, she snatches some bills left behind at an ATM. After all it's her mother's birthday, and just think of what she could do with some cash in her never-quite-enough-money household. But of course she has to hide the money--she can't explain it. And in her tiny house, every hiding place is in danger of discovery. After a few tries, Binny does hide it. And she hides it so well she can't find it again, even after she decides she wants to give it back! Now, Binny must team up with her best enemy Gareth, a ruthlessly honest boy who sets out to play detective and figure out who might have taken the money. Meanwhile the next-door neighbor is doing odd things like presenting Binny with a little doll that looks just like her--with her hand in her pocket, just as Binny's was when she pocketed the cash. Is the witchy neighbor woman putting a spell on Binny? There's plenty more going on in the Cornwallis house, as Binny's older sister Clem has a secret of her own, and little brother James is having a kung fu clash with his best friend. Mayhem, love, and laughter run riot in this new hilarious Binny adventure"-- Provided by publisher.
Record details
- ISBN: 9781481491020
- ISBN: 1481491024
- ISBN: 9781481491037
- Physical Description: 233 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
- Edition: First U.S. edition.
- Publisher: New York : Margaret K. McElderry Books, [2017]
- Copyright: ©2017
Content descriptions
General Note: | "First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Hodder Children's Books"--Title page verso. |
Target Audience Note: | 700 Lexile. Ages 8-12. 700L Lexile |
Study Program Information Note: | Accelerated Reader AR MG 4.8 7.0 189735. |
Search for related items by subject
Subject: | Families > Juvenile fiction. Lost articles > Juvenile fiction. JUVENILE FICTION / Family / Siblings. JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Friendship. JUVENILE FICTION / Animals / Dogs. |
Search for related items by series
Available copies
- 16 of 16 copies available at Evergreen Indiana.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 16 total copies.
Show Only Available Copies
Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adams PL Sys. - Decatur Branch | JF MCK (Text) | 34207002094911 | Juv Fiction | Available | - |
Adams PL Sys. - Geneva Branch | JF MCK (Text) | 34207002354760 | Juvenile Fiction | Available | - |
Alexandria-Monroe PL - Alexandria | jF MCK (Text) | 37521530855883 | AMPL Juvenile Fiction | Available | - |
Brookston Prairie Twp PL - Brookston | J FIC MCK (Text) | 38209000894462 | Juvenile Fiction | Available | - |
Flora-Monroe Twp PL - Flora | JFIC MCK (Text) | 50825010720042 | Juvenile Fiction | Available | - |
Greentown Children's Library - Greentown | J MCKAY (Text) | 75342000339505 | Junior Fiction Chapter | Available | - |
Jay Co PL - Portland | JF McKAY (Text) | 76383000451367 | Junior Fiction | Available | - |
LaGrange Co PL - Bookmobile | ju McK (Text) | 30477101110041 | Children: Chapter Book | Available | - |
LaGrange Co PL - LaGrange Main Library | ju McK (Text) | 30477101110058 | Children: Chapter Book | Available | - |
Melton PL - Melton | JUV FIC MCK (Text) | 79591000087846 | Juvenile-Fiction | Available | - |
Loading Recommendations...
Binny Bewitched
From the New Notebook
We have been unpacking the last few boxes of things from our old house. It is four years since they were packed. Mum remembers that Granny did it when Dad died and we had to move. Granny is dead now too.
There are a lot of dead people in my family.
How sad that looks, written down. I tried it on my friends, first Gareth and then Clare.
Gareth said, âThere are a lot of dead people in everyoneâs families. There are more live ones in your family than mine.â
A short arguing calculation proved that he was right. Gareth is an only child and he does not count his wicked stepmother as family because she is allergic to dogs, although otherwise not wicked at all.
Clare was just as unsympathetic. She said, âOld people are meant to be dead.â
âDad wasnât really old. Not ancient old, like Granny.â
âIf we are going to start moaning about fathers,â said Clare, âget ready to get over yourself because I will win.â
Clareâs father disappeared when she was six weeks old, remarking (as he dumped two children and one small unprofitable farm on Clareâs mother) (but took the family car) that he could do without the stress. Clare says he owes her twelve birthday presents, thirteen Christmas presents, thirteen Easter eggs, eight good excuses for missing school sports day, and fifteen parentsâ evenings. So she is right, she will win, and anyway, I was not moaning. I was just trying out what I had written in my notebook against real life. I said this to Clare, and she replied, âThere shouldnât be any difference,â and I couldnât be bothered to explain to her that she was wrong.
But I didnât mean to sound sad when I wrote about my family. We are not sad.
*Â Â *Â Â *
Not even about money.
I wish we had more money.
Before my father died my family didnât have to worry about money. Or anyway, we thought we didnât. But we were wrong, and so we went bankrupt, Mum and Clem and James and me, but not Dad, he died just in time. What I mean is, if you have to die, itâs better to do it before you go bankrupt. And have to sell your family bookshop and your house and lose your dog Max and go and live in dingy little flats where the damp gives you coughs and there is no outside space and all the people you thought were your friends turn out not to care much about you after all.
And you turn out not to care much about them. You havenât time. You hang on tight and forget a lot of things.
We forgot the boxes. They were at Grannyâs house for ages. Then we moved here, to Cornwall, and the boxes came with us but they still didnât get unpacked. That was because we were too busy getting rid of the ten thousand bags of junk and ten million spiders left behind by Aunty Violet, whose house this used to be.
It wasnât box-time then, either. Just when we had it possible to live here without something making you scream or falling down on you, an autumn gale swept in from the sea and blew great holes in the roof.
When you have a roof, you donât think about it. But when you donât have a roof, when you go up the stairs in your house and see your bedroom and your soggy wallpaper and your school shoes filled with rain, and sky over your head, proper sky, real sky with clouds and airplanes, a lot of sky, then you think about roofs.
The roof only took a few hours to blow off, but it took months to get back on again. When it was on, but the scaffolding was still there, I climbed up and I leaned right over the new tiles and I pushed and pulled as hard as I could. I was checking that nothing was loose. Pete, the builder who had done the tiling, saw me and came up and grabbed me by my jacket and he made me put an orange hard hat on and he didnât let go until he got me on the ground. Then he shouted a lot, and he said he would tell my mother and he did.
So I was officially told off and made to promise not to do it again. It wasnât a very good telling off, not good enough for Pete, because Mum admitted sheâd been wondering about doing the same thing herself.
âAt least now we know itâs solid,â she said, hugging me, and Clem and James were also pleased to hear how tightly our new roof was stuck on.
âIt didnât move, even a tiny bit?â asked James.
âOf course it flipping didnât move even a tiny bit!â said Pete. âDonât you trust me?â
âOh yes,â said James, and Mum and Clem agreed, âOh yes, oh yes,â and then Clem asked how high Iâd managed to reach, and Mum wanted to know if Iâd tried in more than one place, and if Iâd seen any cracks.
âWell, thank you very much!â said Pete, and he stalked off in a huff.
(My writing has gone wandering away. It has left the boxes, still unpacked, and ended up on the roof of our house.)
So back to the boxes.
One of them was very heavy. It was full of great big albums. The largest, labeled âClemencyâs First Year,â was stuffed with photos and excited comments like: First taste of APPLE!!!! and HOW did Clemency get RIGHT to the end of her cot??? (There were four of these: spring, summer, autumn, and winter.) I just got one album, half full, and poor old James had a completely empty-except-for-the-first-page scrapbook. He was not happy about this and wanted Mum to sit down and write four more volumes instantly.
âI will, I will,â said Mum, âor you can have a giant bag of Mexican Barbecue Fries. They were on sale. Go and look in the cupboard!â
As well as the albums there were boxes of storybooks from when we were little, and from when Mum and Dad were little too, and there was Dadâs old brown bag.
How strange to see that bag, so familiar and so forgotten. I knew every mark and scuff on the leather, but I had never looked inside. Dad never went out of the house without it. The handle was shaped from years and years of being held in the grip of his right hand.
âAre we going to open it?â asked Clem.
Mum said she would rather not just then, but that Clem and I could if we liked. We nearly didnât; it had been shut for so long. We looked at it for ages before we undid the buckle. It felt so wrong. I wondered if Clem felt as I did, that perhaps in the bag would be something to help us understand why he had left so suddenly and unhelpfully, like someone walking out in the middle of a conversation.
There is a book called The Railway Children that we found when we were unpacking the boxes and in it there is a family with a father who goes away. The eldest girl, who is called Bobby, doesnât know where heâs gone, and she says IS HE DEAD? but heâs not. Heâs in prison.
Dad went bankrupt. Do you get put in prison for that?
There is a stupid thought that I used to let myself think. It begins, What If . . . ?
I didnât go to Dadâs funeral. Clem and James did, but not me. I canât remember one thing about it, but I have been told that at the last minute I went out with our next-door neighbor instead. I have been told that she heroically took me to McDonaldâs, which she chose because she supposed the staff there were used to children behaving terribly. And so they were and so I did, and when the staff heard why we were there, and where we really should have been, the heroic neighbor was given free coffee and tissues and I was given unlimited access to the ice-cream machine, the M&Mâs dispenser, and the tap that squirts tomato sauce.
I missed the funeral, but it still happened. I know that. I know how unreasonable it is to think, What If . . . ? I hardly ever do it anymore. But what if Dad is in prison, not dead? Then we really shouldnât look inside his bag.
I was thinking this when Clem, who had been very quiet, said âWell,â and sighed and began undoing the buckle.
What had Dad been thinking of, when he closed his bag for the last time?
He had been thinking about us.
*Â Â *Â Â *
Dad died the week before Clemâs birthday. I donât think she had one that year, not one that we noticed, anyway. But Dad had not forgotten. The first thing we saw when we looked inside his bag was a little package with a label, a birthday present for Clem. It was all wrapped up with a birthday card for when she was thirteen. A silvery charm bracelet with three charms: music notes and a silver flute and a C for Clem with the C a crescent moon and a crystal like a star. Always on birthdays Dad used to buy extra presents for non birthday people and they were in the bag too. An engine driverâs hat for James, and a very loud whistle to blow when the train was ready to leave the station (because when he was three James was obsessed with trains). A thick blue notebook for me with silver writing in French on the cover under a silver sketch from Dadâs favorite book, The Little Prince. The card with it said, âWith love from Daddy. Never stop writing!â
In the picture on the cover the Little Prince is leaving his very small planet with a flock of birds to help him fly. He is leaving his rose and his sheep and his active volcano. Dad used to call me his active volcano sometimes, and once I asked him, âAnd is Clem the rose? And James the sheep?â
But he had said, no. He said I was the rose and the sheep and the active volcano, all mixed up together. âThe whole story,â he said, âand the birds are your words.â
*Â Â *Â Â *
I donât know how I could stop writing. I write all the time. But I have never had a book to write in as beautiful as this one. The paper is very smooth and creamy, and there is silver elastic that snaps round when it is closed to keep the words safe. The writing on the cover says, âLâessential est invisible pour les yeux.â
One day I will find out what that means.
*Â Â *Â Â *
There was a pencil from our bookshop to go with the notebook, one of the pencils Dad used to give away free.
After the presents I didnât want to look anymore and neither did Clem. We didnât know what to do with the bag. It seemed it should go in an important place, but there arenât really any important places in our house. Itâs too small. So in the end we put it back in the box. Mum said, âI think weâll leave it for a while.â
I know why.
To see his writing, and the pencil from the bookshop.
It felt like he might step through the door.
Chapter One
Binny in Trouble
From the New Notebook
We have been unpacking the last few boxes of things from our old house. It is four years since they were packed. Mum remembers that Granny did it when Dad died and we had to move. Granny is dead now too.
There are a lot of dead people in my family.
How sad that looks, written down. I tried it on my friends, first Gareth and then Clare.
Gareth said, âThere are a lot of dead people in everyoneâs families. There are more live ones in your family than mine.â
A short arguing calculation proved that he was right. Gareth is an only child and he does not count his wicked stepmother as family because she is allergic to dogs, although otherwise not wicked at all.
Clare was just as unsympathetic. She said, âOld people are meant to be dead.â
âDad wasnât really old. Not ancient old, like Granny.â
âIf we are going to start moaning about fathers,â said Clare, âget ready to get over yourself because I will win.â
Clareâs father disappeared when she was six weeks old, remarking (as he dumped two children and one small unprofitable farm on Clareâs mother) (but took the family car) that he could do without the stress. Clare says he owes her twelve birthday presents, thirteen Christmas presents, thirteen Easter eggs, eight good excuses for missing school sports day, and fifteen parentsâ evenings. So she is right, she will win, and anyway, I was not moaning. I was just trying out what I had written in my notebook against real life. I said this to Clare, and she replied, âThere shouldnât be any difference,â and I couldnât be bothered to explain to her that she was wrong.
But I didnât mean to sound sad when I wrote about my family. We are not sad.
*Â Â *Â Â *
Not even about money.
I wish we had more money.
Before my father died my family didnât have to worry about money. Or anyway, we thought we didnât. But we were wrong, and so we went bankrupt, Mum and Clem and James and me, but not Dad, he died just in time. What I mean is, if you have to die, itâs better to do it before you go bankrupt. And have to sell your family bookshop and your house and lose your dog Max and go and live in dingy little flats where the damp gives you coughs and there is no outside space and all the people you thought were your friends turn out not to care much about you after all.
And you turn out not to care much about them. You havenât time. You hang on tight and forget a lot of things.
We forgot the boxes. They were at Grannyâs house for ages. Then we moved here, to Cornwall, and the boxes came with us but they still didnât get unpacked. That was because we were too busy getting rid of the ten thousand bags of junk and ten million spiders left behind by Aunty Violet, whose house this used to be.
It wasnât box-time then, either. Just when we had it possible to live here without something making you scream or falling down on you, an autumn gale swept in from the sea and blew great holes in the roof.
When you have a roof, you donât think about it. But when you donât have a roof, when you go up the stairs in your house and see your bedroom and your soggy wallpaper and your school shoes filled with rain, and sky over your head, proper sky, real sky with clouds and airplanes, a lot of sky, then you think about roofs.
The roof only took a few hours to blow off, but it took months to get back on again. When it was on, but the scaffolding was still there, I climbed up and I leaned right over the new tiles and I pushed and pulled as hard as I could. I was checking that nothing was loose. Pete, the builder who had done the tiling, saw me and came up and grabbed me by my jacket and he made me put an orange hard hat on and he didnât let go until he got me on the ground. Then he shouted a lot, and he said he would tell my mother and he did.
So I was officially told off and made to promise not to do it again. It wasnât a very good telling off, not good enough for Pete, because Mum admitted sheâd been wondering about doing the same thing herself.
âAt least now we know itâs solid,â she said, hugging me, and Clem and James were also pleased to hear how tightly our new roof was stuck on.
âIt didnât move, even a tiny bit?â asked James.
âOf course it flipping didnât move even a tiny bit!â said Pete. âDonât you trust me?â
âOh yes,â said James, and Mum and Clem agreed, âOh yes, oh yes,â and then Clem asked how high Iâd managed to reach, and Mum wanted to know if Iâd tried in more than one place, and if Iâd seen any cracks.
âWell, thank you very much!â said Pete, and he stalked off in a huff.
(My writing has gone wandering away. It has left the boxes, still unpacked, and ended up on the roof of our house.)
So back to the boxes.
One of them was very heavy. It was full of great big albums. The largest, labeled âClemencyâs First Year,â was stuffed with photos and excited comments like: First taste of APPLE!!!! and HOW did Clemency get RIGHT to the end of her cot??? (There were four of these: spring, summer, autumn, and winter.) I just got one album, half full, and poor old James had a completely empty-except-for-the-first-page scrapbook. He was not happy about this and wanted Mum to sit down and write four more volumes instantly.
âI will, I will,â said Mum, âor you can have a giant bag of Mexican Barbecue Fries. They were on sale. Go and look in the cupboard!â
As well as the albums there were boxes of storybooks from when we were little, and from when Mum and Dad were little too, and there was Dadâs old brown bag.
How strange to see that bag, so familiar and so forgotten. I knew every mark and scuff on the leather, but I had never looked inside. Dad never went out of the house without it. The handle was shaped from years and years of being held in the grip of his right hand.
âAre we going to open it?â asked Clem.
Mum said she would rather not just then, but that Clem and I could if we liked. We nearly didnât; it had been shut for so long. We looked at it for ages before we undid the buckle. It felt so wrong. I wondered if Clem felt as I did, that perhaps in the bag would be something to help us understand why he had left so suddenly and unhelpfully, like someone walking out in the middle of a conversation.
There is a book called The Railway Children that we found when we were unpacking the boxes and in it there is a family with a father who goes away. The eldest girl, who is called Bobby, doesnât know where heâs gone, and she says IS HE DEAD? but heâs not. Heâs in prison.
Dad went bankrupt. Do you get put in prison for that?
There is a stupid thought that I used to let myself think. It begins, What If . . . ?
I didnât go to Dadâs funeral. Clem and James did, but not me. I canât remember one thing about it, but I have been told that at the last minute I went out with our next-door neighbor instead. I have been told that she heroically took me to McDonaldâs, which she chose because she supposed the staff there were used to children behaving terribly. And so they were and so I did, and when the staff heard why we were there, and where we really should have been, the heroic neighbor was given free coffee and tissues and I was given unlimited access to the ice-cream machine, the M&Mâs dispenser, and the tap that squirts tomato sauce.
I missed the funeral, but it still happened. I know that. I know how unreasonable it is to think, What If . . . ? I hardly ever do it anymore. But what if Dad is in prison, not dead? Then we really shouldnât look inside his bag.
I was thinking this when Clem, who had been very quiet, said âWell,â and sighed and began undoing the buckle.
What had Dad been thinking of, when he closed his bag for the last time?
He had been thinking about us.
*Â Â *Â Â *
Dad died the week before Clemâs birthday. I donât think she had one that year, not one that we noticed, anyway. But Dad had not forgotten. The first thing we saw when we looked inside his bag was a little package with a label, a birthday present for Clem. It was all wrapped up with a birthday card for when she was thirteen. A silvery charm bracelet with three charms: music notes and a silver flute and a C for Clem with the C a crescent moon and a crystal like a star. Always on birthdays Dad used to buy extra presents for non birthday people and they were in the bag too. An engine driverâs hat for James, and a very loud whistle to blow when the train was ready to leave the station (because when he was three James was obsessed with trains). A thick blue notebook for me with silver writing in French on the cover under a silver sketch from Dadâs favorite book, The Little Prince. The card with it said, âWith love from Daddy. Never stop writing!â
In the picture on the cover the Little Prince is leaving his very small planet with a flock of birds to help him fly. He is leaving his rose and his sheep and his active volcano. Dad used to call me his active volcano sometimes, and once I asked him, âAnd is Clem the rose? And James the sheep?â
But he had said, no. He said I was the rose and the sheep and the active volcano, all mixed up together. âThe whole story,â he said, âand the birds are your words.â
*Â Â *Â Â *
I donât know how I could stop writing. I write all the time. But I have never had a book to write in as beautiful as this one. The paper is very smooth and creamy, and there is silver elastic that snaps round when it is closed to keep the words safe. The writing on the cover says, âLâessential est invisible pour les yeux.â
One day I will find out what that means.
*Â Â *Â Â *
There was a pencil from our bookshop to go with the notebook, one of the pencils Dad used to give away free.
After the presents I didnât want to look anymore and neither did Clem. We didnât know what to do with the bag. It seemed it should go in an important place, but there arenât really any important places in our house. Itâs too small. So in the end we put it back in the box. Mum said, âI think weâll leave it for a while.â
I know why.
To see his writing, and the pencil from the bookshop.
It felt like he might step through the door.